An A+ For Drug Tests

Testing student athletes for drug use has become so routine at
Dunbar High School in Lexington, Kentucky, that parents solicit funds
to pay for it right along with baseball mitts and cheerleaders'
uniforms. "It's like we breathe this drug-testing thing; its
automatic," says Jim Franklin after an evening of hawking tickets at
the Jackpot Bingo parlor to raise money for the Dunbar Bulldogs, his
son's high school football team.

Of the $50,000 that parents like Franklin raise for Dunbar football
each year through bingo, car washes, and other fund-raisers, about
$3,500 is set aside to defray the cost of testing players for cocaine,
marijuana, and other drugs. And it doesn't stop there. Parents raise an
additional $12,000 annually to screen students participating in other
team sports, as well.

Franklin, whose son is the Bulldogs' quarterback, says it's worth
every penny. "The drug tests give students a reason to say no to
temptation," he says. "If students know they'll be tested, they aren't
as likely to be led astray."

Since the U.S. Supreme Court gave schools the constitutional green
light to screen student athletes for drugs four years ago, more than
100 districts in at least 20 states have begun testing programs. Here
in Lexington, a city of 226,000 in Kentucky's bluegrass country, the
local school board gave Dunbar High the go-ahead in 1996.

Many educators and parents now endorse this clinical, though still
largely unproven, method of fighting drug use among teens because they
believe soft-sell classroom approaches aren't working. In a 1998
federal survey, more than 41 percent of 12th graders and 35 percent of
10th graders said they had tried an illicit drug in the past year. "To
all the education gurus who think their programs work, I say, Without
the drug testing you don't have the hammer to help kids make good
choices," says Ron Slinger, a former public school athletic director in
Dixon, California, and a consultant for a drug-testing company. "Kids
are experimenters, [but] they understand consequences." If you put up a
"radar or a stop sign," they will quit, he insists.

Civil liberties groups have long argued that school-related drug
testing violates students' 14th Amendment protection against
unreasonable searches. But in 1995, in a case involving Oregon's
Vernonia School District, the Supreme Court held that screening student
athletes for drugs did not run afoul of the Constitution. The justices
ruled that schoolchildren have fewer rights than adults and that
athletes' expectations of privacy are lower because teammates undress
together in locker rooms. What's more, they said, screening athletes is
reasonable because shooting hoops or running bases are voluntary
activities.

The law on testing students engaged in other kinds of extra
curricular activities is far less settled. Last year, the Colorado
Supreme Court ruled against a district that had required drug tests of
all extracurricular participants, including members of the marching
band. Federal appeals courts, however, have seen such programs in a
more favorable light. In April, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 8th Circuit sided with the Cave City, Arkansas,
school district in a case brought by a student who wanted to join the
radio club and the prom committee but refused to take the mandated drug
test. And in an earlier decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th
Circuit upheld a Rush County, Indiana, policy requiring a drug test of
all students taking part in an extracurricular activity. The Supreme
Court declined to review that ruling last fall.

Lexington's Dunbar High School tests only student athletes. On this
particular spring day, the school is screening boys who hope to join
the baseball, tennis, or track teams. They filter out of their classes
and line up outside one of the restrooms. Inside the cramped lavatory,
two technicians from a drug-testing company pass out specimen cups.
Some of the teenagers chug bottles of Sprite or Coke to coax the
process along.

"You have a few students every year who have shy bladders," says
Dunbar assistant principal Ray Woodyard, who is in charge of drug
screening for the 2,000-student school. "But if they don't go, they
don't play."

The same drill is repeated before each sport season. Over the course
of the year, the school screens some 500 student athletes-male and
female-for marijuana, cocaine, LSD, PCP, opiates, barbiturates,
methadone, and, sometimes, steroids. Then one out of four athletes is
randomly checked at monthly intervals throughout the year.

If a student tests positive, he or she is barred from competition
for a month and must pay for drug counseling. Those who fail twice
can't compete for a season and must complete a drug-rehabilitation
program. Three positive results and they are permanently off the
team.

Dunbar principal Jon Akers says such strict measures became
necessary three years ago when police investigated four school soccer
players for possible marijuana and LSD use during the summer. Worried
that they might have a wider problem, administrators surveyed students.
Of the 434 polled, 126 reported having smoked marijuana within the past
month, 184 said they had ridden in a car with someone high on
marijuana, and 46 said they had been in a car driven by someone high on
LSD.

"That scared the doo-wah-ditty out of the parents," Akers says.
Since then, the school has conducted roughly 2,400 drug tests, and only
one student has turned up positive-proving, the principal says, that
drug use, at least among athletes, has declined.

Akers insists that the school needs to test for drug use, if for no
other reason than to guarantee the players' safety. But the argument
doesn't fly with some Dunbar students, who say school officials are
invading their privacy. "It's none of their business," says Justin
Scott, a 17-year-old baseball player, as he ducks into the bathroom for
his obligatory screening. "You aren't going to be a failure in life if
you use drugs."

Bill Cole, leader of Lexington's chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union, believes the mandatory testing is not only bad policy
but also bad education. "This is not about safety; it's about control,"
Cole says. "We're teaching children that because they don't vote, they
have no voice, and we can do what we want with them."

Though no hard data are available on whether school-based testing
works to prevent student drug abuse, private-sector experts say
screening a distinct population is usually ineffective. "Testing
programs work best in the workplace when they are given randomly to
everybody, even the bosses," says Mathea Falco, president of Drug
Strategies, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. "When you're
just rating specific groups, the temptation is to beat the system."

Several students say that's happening at Dunbar. Some of their
peers, they say, dropped team sports to avoid the testing when it was
introduced. Others simply restrict their drug use to the off-season. "I
can go a season without doing something illegal," one student says
after emerging from the lavatory.

And then there are those who try to cheat the test. "You just buy
powdery stuff at nutrition stores and mix it with water, and then
you're fine," says Jaryn Oakley, a 15-year-old cheerleader. Oakley says
she's seen girls in the school bathroom empty packets of powder into a
jug of water and drink it. "When I say, 'What's that for?' they answer,
'The drug test.'"

Richard Schwartz, a pediatrician at the Inova Hospital for Children
in Falls Church, Virginia, and an expert on adolescent drug use, says
that drinking cranberry juice or teas can dilute a drug's concentration
and that products like dehydrated urine and other additives can mask a
positive result. "You could drink 10 different things to sanitize your
urine and make a test negative that should be positive," Schwartz says.
Many such products, like one called Urine Luck, are easily available
through the Internet.

Paula Childs, a spokeswoman for LabCorp, the Burlington, North
Carolina, company that conducts the tests at Dunbar, says the firm
takes precautions to prevent cheating. The technicians use cups with
temperature gauges to make sure the specimens come from warm bodies.
But the method is not foolproof, she says.

Meanwhile, parents like David Stone, a Lexington businessman whose
son played on Dunbar's soccer team, stand firmly behind the testing.
"Down the road, kids are going to be scrutinized more and more on the
job for substance abuse," Stone says. "This is just preparation for
when they go out into the real world."

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